


where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay

by mollivanders



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Universe, Established Relationship, F/F, Rebellion, Resistance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-15 21:56:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21025364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mollivanders/pseuds/mollivanders
Summary: She’s known Tahani for a year and more lifetimes than that, and she’s learning faster in their first days together than she ever has before. When they die – again – it hardly feels like dying. She feels too alive to be dying. It’s only when Janet ejects them back out of the neat little escape world in her void, and Michael tells them all they’re massively forked that the real afterworld comes crashing in.(Stupid forking afterworld.)“No one’s gotten into the Good Place in 500 years,” Michael says grimly before jettisoning them all into a rabbit hole of an inter-dimensional space tube. On the way up, all Eleanor can think of is the confusing mix of rules about motivation and points and credits – and how, even now, in the face of certain doom, the only certainty is Tahani’s hand in hers.(It leads her to a revelation that changes everything all over again.)





	where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay

**Author's Note:**

> Written because if The Good Place isn’t going to deal with the fact that the afterlife is a rigged game between not counting purity of motivation if the deeds have unintended bad consequences, and not counting good deeds without unintended consequences but with impure motivations, I had to write the wlw rebellion against hell myself.
> 
> Starts to shift the S3 timeline around 3x07 'The Worst Possible Use of Free Will', and goes off the rails from 3x09 'Janet(s)'. Resistance AU, baby.

After Michael shows her the reboot with her and Chidi – it doesn’t stick the way he’d intended. She believes, in the end, that she loved Chidi in that life (afterlife). She believes maybe she could love him in another.

That doesn’t mean she loves him in this one, now.

In fact, the strongest argument in favor of free will isn’t one Michael made, try as he might. Fair points for what he came up with, she supposes, but as she examines her heart for maybe the first time _ever_ (that she knows of), it’s the leggy disaster walking in the door that makes her heart skip to a new beat and dream new dreams, dreams Michael hasn’t funneled her towards or argued were objective truth. It’s the way Tahani catches her eyes – pauses – and smiles the purest smile this side of the Atlantic at Eleanor that wakes up a part of her she didn’t know was sleeping; a part of her that opens up a whole new world.

(It’s the smile, Eleanor realizes, that she only gives to her.)

+

“You good with this, hot stuff?” Eleanor asks between breathless kisses, stretching to the top of her toes for a better angle. Tahani’s hands are everywhere and her heart is pounding harder and faster and more dangerously than it should. Maybe none of this is allowed in Michael’s rules; maybe they’re in another misfiled reboot she’ll never learn about.

(Maybe this one is actually all that matters.)

“It took us long enough, Eleanor,” Tahani says matter-of-factly and pulls Eleanor back towards the hotel bed. It makes an uneasy squeak when they land on it, laughing, and Eleanor gasps as Tahani rolls them over, pulling Eleanor’s shirt off in one easy movement. She swears colorfully, heat rising in her cheeks, and Tahani laughs, kissing her sweetly towards a new drowning.

If nothing else – they’ll always have Calgary.

+

She’s known Tahani for a year and more lifetimes than that, and she’s learning faster in their first days together than she ever has before. When they die – again – it hardly feels like dying. She feels too alive to be dying. It’s only when Janet ejects them back out of the neat little escape world in her void, and Michael tells them all they’re massively forked that the real afterworld comes crashing in. 

(Stupid forking afterworld.)

“No one’s gotten into the Good Place in 500 years,” Michael says grimly before jettisoning them all into a rabbit hole of an inter-dimensional space tube. On the way up, all Eleanor can think of is the confusing mix of rules about motivation and points and credits – and how, even now, in the face of certain doom, the only certainty is Tahani’s hand in hers.

(It leads her to a revelation that changes everything all over again.)

+

“Well that’s it, then,” Eleanor says once they’ve all sort of managed to get back to standing positions. Flying through inter-dimensional space tubes to the actual Good Place – which looks more like a mail depot than anything else – sure did a number on your forking headspace.

“What’s what?” Michael asks, somehow still looking put-together. The dude had mad demon skills.

“The system’s rigged, man,” Eleanor says, and looks at the others in turn. “You said it yourself. _Harriet Tubman_ wasn’t allowed in. That system is broken, _by design_.” Her heart is pounding unnaturally fast for someone who doesn’t have a body anymore, and it makes her wonder what else her afterlife body can do. 

(_Focus_, Eleanor.)

“But we have a plan,” Michael interrupts, and holds up the book they’d stolen from Accounting. “We can take it up with the Committee and they’ll understand that the world is too complicated now for humans to get into the Good Place on the points system. They need to fix it.”

“You’re kidding, right?” she asks, and looks at Tahani. She looks frightened but determined to listen, and despite the fact that the anxiety that drove half her bad decisions is threatening to boil over, and she honestly doesn’t know what that’s going to do to her in this place, Tahani’s reassuring nod centers her. She plows forward. “Like the Committee doesn’t know? Like the _Judge_ doesn’t know?”

“What are you saying, Eleanor?” Tahani asks, quiet but receptive, and Eleanor wishes they could just go back to hiding in Janet’s escape void for five minutes to properly thank her.

“The Bad Place couldn’t pull this off alone,” Eleanor says, and pivots on her heel to look at Michael. “If the Judge is actually _the_ Judge of the universe, she knows. She’s supposed to know everything, right?”

The shock looks like it’s finally hitting Michael – either from the inter-dimensional space tube ride or this new disaster they have to solve. It is _way_ above her pay grade, but for fork’s sake, if _she_ can figure it out – 

“You’re saying it’s rigged,” Chidi says, a statement of fact with all the authority of his professor days. He’s not questioning her, or arguing. He sees the writing on the wall as plain as she does, as Tahani does.

(To Jason’s credit – he usually thinks the system is rigged anyway.)

Not for the first time, she really wishes he was right and someone would just show up to save them.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m saying it’s rigged.”

+

The news sort of takes Michael out for a good hour. It’s not as bad as the time they broke him trying to teach him philosophy – by his account – but it’s a close thing, and it takes Janet slapping him across the face using some immortal entity magic trick to snap him back to attention.

The deduction was fairly simple and followed the basic principles Michael had told them from the start; this start, at least. Good deeds only counted if their motivations were pure, and that’s why they’d been screwed on Earth once they’d known about the points system. On the other hand, Accounting didn’t seem to give two shirts about intention or motivation but just what the net effect of any action was. You could have the purest motivations in the universe and still end up in the Bad Place, and if you did any good at all but with impure motivations, you were still screwed.

By the time Chidi finishes explaining it to Michael again, and the real scale of the forkhole they’ve landed in, Eleanor’s wearing a hole in the carpet thinking about what the hell they’re going to do, bouncing ideas off of Tahani and Jason, which at least is giving Janet the space she clearly needs from everyone right now.

“We can’t work within their system,” she says. “Either the Judge is in on it and doesn’t care, _or_ \- ” She spins around and points a finger at Michael. “She’s not the most powerful all knowing entity in the universe.”

“I mean, she might not be,” Michael admits and Chidi throws his hands up in frustration. Tahani, on the other hand, looks completely unsurprised.

(Eleanor gets it – there’s always someone with a higher pay grade. _Always_.)

“I don’t know!” Michael exclaims. “I was a low-ranking demon architect on my first round with you guys. There’s a lot I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” Jason says, and pats a spot on the (actual) bench he’s sitting on. “You can hang out with me. I never know what’s going on.”

“That’s true,” Michael agrees, and sits next to Jason who, for all the chaos he spreads, has the most calming effect on anyone Eleanor has ever seen (bar one).

“So if we can’t work within the system, we have two options,” Eleanor says, and looks to Tahani. “We can run, or – ”

“We can fight,” Tahani finishes, and nods grimly.

+

The first problem is getting out of this portal they’ve landed themselves into. They have to sneak back into Accounting, which isn’t really an option given the way they blew out of there, so they do the only thing they can do.

They fight their way out.

There’s not much in the way of armory in the Good Place mail depot – but on the other hand, they’re fighting number-punchers who won’t bother to wait around forever for them to reappear.

(Michael points out they _could_ wait around forever, but as Eleanor learned a long time ago – it’s all about picking your moment.)

Janet can _bloop_ between realms now that she’s not carrying the extra baggage of human souls, and she seems about as eager to escape the mail depot as the rest of them – maybe it’s just them she wants to get away from. 

(There’s a lot to unpack there, Eleanor knows. It’ll have to wait.)

After Jason’s Molotov cocktail hits, Janet _bloops_ back to let them know to come through and one by one they slide back through the inter-dimensional space tube to Accounting. From there, they sneak out to the Neutral Zone which has a _lot_ more than Accounting in it.

Importantly, it has the Processing Center. It’s a weird-as-fork place, with zoned-out human souls in standby mode while their paperwork is processed and they’re sent to, inevitably (apparently), the Bad Place. For all that nobody has gone anywhere else going on five centuries, the Neutral Zone seems to value paperwork more than anything – and so that’s where they start.

(That’s where it all begins.)

More practically, it actually begins in an IHOP sanctuary.

+

Eleanor didn’t achieve much in her life, unless you counted a string of stalked ex-boyfriends, duped friends and hapless retail customers, horrified teachers, and the stain on the bedroom wall in her third apartment which her roommate was really pissed about (it was her bedroom). There was one thing Eleanor _was_ really good at though – coming up with plans and executing them. It was just that usually those plans involved chaos and promoting her personal interest above others.

_One_ of those things was still relevant here.

“You’ll need these,” Janet insists, and materializes fake IDs and outfits for them all – Jason’s badge, Eleanor notices, has him looking even more handsome than usual. She takes hers with a grin, a memory not fit for the Good Place coming to mind. The credentials themselves are blank; Janet says they’ll match whatever they need to get into a place.

“You really can create anything, can’t you?” Tahani asks and Janet nods happily.

“Does any of this go against your programming as a Good Janet?” Michael asks, pinning the fake credentials to his suit. 

Janet shrugs, a half-smile hovering around her lips. “I don’t know that I have programming anymore,” she says. “Or if I’m even a Good Janet anymore.”

“Maybe not,” Eleanor says, “but maybe that makes you one of us.”

“Hmm,” Janet says. “I am one of a kind. That’s true.”

+

The first step was figuring out everyone’s tasks, and really that just meant stuff they were already good at. The goal was to fight their way out to the top, for the sake of all humanity, and if they had to, take the Good Place back for humanity. As that involved breaking some rules, Eleanor stuck herself with all the organizational work she would normally pass off to someone else with no concern for the consequences. 

The first thing they needed was more help – there were only six of them and eventually, they’d just be outnumbered. On the other hand, there were a functionally infinite number of humans coming and going through the afterworld, and once they were told they were going to the Bad Place no matter what, were eager to join the resistance.

As their numbers grow, Chidi volunteers to handle a refugee center, sorting people into groups – neighborhoods, almost. The IHOP was a terrible place to store human souls, but it sucked infinitely less than the actual Bad Place, so Janet and Michael made it over so humans wouldn’t be instantly terrified, and even made it so there were pancakes.

“I think this might be the foundation for the actual neighborhoods,” Michael says thoughtfully. “We would just build over voids, but the IHOP is kind of like a void.”

“I can work with that,” Eleanor says. An idea is already half-forming in her mind.

+

The IHOP, thanks to Janet, includes a very nice room that Eleanor and Tahani stake out at the start.

“Nicer than Calgary, huh?” Eleanor says, running her hand over the dark satin duvet. There’s a scent of roses in the air and Tahani looks like she’s walking on air.

“I only remember nice things about Calgary,” she says, winking over her shoulder at Eleanor. She still only wears fashionable dresses, cocktail and ball gown affairs that Eleanor wants to slide right off her shoulders, leaving a trail of kisses in their place.

(For all that they are the human resistance – there are moments like this, alone, that lighten the burden.)

“Eleanor,” Tahani says, a knowing note in her voice, and Eleanor shakes herself back to the present. “Take me with you, why don’t you?”

They’re safe, hidden away in the Interdimensional Hole of Pancakes, and the scent of warm maple syrup lingers everywhere. Eleanor links their hands together, pulling Tahani close and breathing deeply.

“I have some intel for you,” she says, and wets her lips as Tahani arches an eyebrow at her.

“Really, Eleanor,” Tahani says, and steals a single kiss before standing out of reach again. “You always have intel.”

“Yeah,” Eleanor admits. “So stay close, huh?

“You betcha,” Tahani says, more than a little steel in her voice, and catches Eleanor’s smile. “I wouldn’t want to lose you in this – ” She gestures helplessly, still not _totally_ accepting of their totally weird life. “Place.”

(She hates to admit it, even to herself – but she might be happy.)

+

With Chidi infiltrating Accounting and checking the profiles of people before Jason grabs them from Processing – he’s getting more stealthy and skilled by the day – there are few mishaps in who they rescue first. As Chidi identifies more people to rescue, and Jason and Michael handle the rescuing, Janet convinces Neutral Janets to help them on the logic that it’s no different than doing nothing at all. It takes the burden of all the IHOP work off their Janet, and it leaves Eleanor and Tahani free to do what they do best.

(What they do is – it’s not something either of them would want for Chidi or Jason or the rest. It’s why they have a refuge for just the two of them; why Tahani’s voice has more steel in it than she did in life; why Eleanor wishes she could sleep it off the way she could in life.)

It still needs to be done.

+

As a Procurement manager, Tahani can get them all the supplies Janet is restricted from getting, like weird weapons that Michael drops as soon as they hand him one, referencing a _Fall_ that makes Chidi look up sharply and interrogate him in a corner for hours. Most of them glow and feel like they’re burning her hands, except – as she still has to remind herself – she’s already dead! So no harm done, right?

(She hopes.)

She and Tahani practice with them, and then they start training some of the humans who want to help. Jason lends his own flavor to the process, and pretty soon they’re launching guerilla attacks on transportation between the Bad Place and the Neutral Zone. It’s the first step in protecting themselves as they search for the entrance to the Good Place, or the Conference Rooms (which Michael thinks are close to the Good Place). The Neutral Zone slowly starts to patrol more regularly, but the wild thing about being neutral is that they’re as un-invested as stopping them as they are in helping them, so they make slow progress. It’s hard to find four humans and a demon and a Janet; it’s harder still to know how many humans are actually running around. They lose a few people early on, but since Janet is the only one who can take them to and from the IHOP, Eleanor hopes against hope they’ll make up for it in the end.

(She honestly doesn’t know how Chidi is balancing things in his head, and at this point is too afraid to ask.)

For all that, it’s still not enough, not really, and Eleanor cycles through a series of fake credentials, wearing more hats than she ever did in life. Sometimes it’s too much – sometimes she’s just a girl from Arizona.

(On days like that, Tahani stops what she’s doing and pulls Eleanor into an empty corner of the IHOP, and makes her rethink that whole worldview.)

+

They’ve been at it for months – or as close as _months_ get with Jeremy Bearimy – and the Committee is still waiting them out, changing exit protocols and the entrance to the actual Good Place. They have eternity to figure it out, but the longer they stay in the IHOP, the worse things got for every other human in history both written and unwritten.

It’s on their way back from another sneak attack when Eleanor freezes, overhearing two Accountants talking about _St. Claire_.

“Are you _forking_ kidding me?” she hisses to the skies, and Tahani, covering their escape in a frankly stellar black outfit that could pass for an evening gown, whips her head around in concern.

“Are we blown?” she asks, and honestly she’s so forking adorable that Eleanor wants to kiss her the and there. She would, but for the fact that they are actually literally running for their souls and the souls of all humankind. It’ll have to wait, fork it.

“I don’t think so,” Eleanor says, “but when we get back, I have a new plan.”

The IHOP looks like an actual IHOP through Janet and Michael’s magic, which doesn’t even make it one of the top five weirdest places Eleanor has hidden out, but it makes it easier to pull the six of them into a single booth and point out a flaw that really, they should have noticed as soon as the reveal about nobody getting in to the Good Place happened.

_Mindy St. Claire_ had happened.

They needed to get to the Medium Place – which meant they needed to go through the Bad Place.

“Is it a trap?” Jason asks, and everyone looks at him. “I always think everything’s a trap, because I made a lot of traps in life,” he explains.

“Maybe. Probably. Yes,” she admits. “I don’t know what else we should do though,” she says. “We’ll , only go if we all agree?”

Tahani takes her right hand, and Jason crosses over to link his right arm with her left. Chidi nods, looking at Michael, who sighs and sits down.

“To the Bad Place then,” he says.

(To hell – and maybe back.)

+

It takes longer than it might have otherwise, since they’ve been screwing with all transportation between the Neutral Zone and the Bad Place, but Team Cockroach makes it through by foot – which is far more terrifying than it sounded when Michael first explained the plan. The train tracks literally span over nothingness – as in, they’ll fall into nothing, and keep falling forever, and it’s nowhere, so they’d never be found.

(The afterworld is just So Much Fun!)

They don’t go on foot after that — they crawl on _all fours_ over the tricky spots and Eleanor counts down from a thousand by sevens to keep her afterlife breathing in check. Just behind her, Tahani is name dropping celebrities like her life depends on it, and Chidi seems to have shut down verbally _entirely_ except to call out Kant’s name when he loses his balance. Eleanor wants to reassure them both but she’s too afraid it’ll break their concentration if she interrupts any of their mental tight wires so she just keeps counting down, and then again.

Jason, somehow, isn’t fazed _at all_.

(Honestly – somehow – yeah, she’d expected that.)

When they make it to the Bad Place, they have to navigate through the neighborhoods without being detected, but months of practice in the Neutral Zone make that easier than it should have been. It all feels final, like they won’t be coming back this way anyway, and so every step forward is more allowed than any step back. The road behind them cannot be retread again, and when she looks back, she finds that to be truer than she expected. 

They’re cut off. The only way out is through – so they keep walking.

“I hate walking,” Janet reiterates for the thousandth time as they trudge through the barren wasteland between neighborhoods. “I wasn’t sure before, but yep. I definitely hate it.”

When they come to Mindy St. Claire’s house, the entirety of the Medium Place that shouldn’t exist by Accounting’s own logic, she’s waiting for them in her front garden (in the nude, of course).

“About time,” she says once she stops screaming in surprise, and ushers them into the house.

+

“So it’s like threadbare fabric,” Tahani says after Mindy explains what she knows in the new context of their discoveries. “It’s bending the rules, but not breaking them, so it can exist – but if you push too hard at any part of it – ”

“It’ll tear. Yeah,” Mindy says, and picks up a warm beer, scrunching her nose as she takes a sip. “Not as good as cocaine,” she says, and winks at Eleanor.

Oh boy.

“You’ve been here a while,” Eleanor says. “Any ideas on where to push?”

Mindy shrugs, looking back and forth at Eleanor and Tahani. “I spend a lot of time in the garden,” she says. “That’s as far as I’ve gotten.” She nods over at Chidi. “If you want the spare room, it’s yours,” she says – but she doesn’t look surprised when Eleanor takes Tahani’s hand as they seek it out.

(She'd had a feeling Michael had left some things out.)

+

“Do you remember this place?” Tahani asks, turning on her side to look at Eleanor. Her brain is overfull with plans and logistics, and when she’d looked outside in the morning there was a wide perimeter around Mindy’s house that just _stopped_ at an invisible border lined by fruit trees. The trap had closed around them, and she was worn out from more ways than she knew to think around it now. She wasn’t a fighter; she was just a girl from Arizona.

“No,” Eleanor admits. “But it was in the memory Michael showed me.” Tahani’s mouth twitches inscrutably, and Eleanor sighs, pulling herself up into a sitting position. “I ran away here a lot, apparently.”

“Seems like a great place to run away,” Tahani says, keeping a straight face, and Eleanor smiles wanly.

“I know there’s someplace better,” she says. “I just don’t know how to get there.”

“Eleanor, I believe in you,” Tahani says, taking her hand. “I believe in us, all of us. You’re not doing this alone.” She pauses, her smile reaching her eyes. “I wouldn’t let you.”

At the end of the world, trapped behind enemy lines and with no way out, Eleanor reaches up to kiss Tahani as sweetly and perfectly as she can, a kiss that crosses lifetimes and washes her anew in this one.

+

(She dreams. She dreams of past lives, and wars that have nothing to do with her, and some that do, and a woman, turning in a garden, naked and clean, holding a simple fruit in the palm of her hand. It falls, and as it falls, a world grows up around them, an Eden from eternity.  
_Eleanor_, she says, _you know._)

When she wakes – the dream stays.

+

The tree is a simple tree, unobtrusive, unnoticeable, right in Mindy's backyard. The fruit hanging from its branches are small and not ripe; a medium fruit. Everyone she loves is standing around her, tension in their every breath, as she plucks a single apple from the tree and in a swift movement, plants it in the ground with a blunt knife and _pulls_. For a moment, nothing happens – 

“It’s not the power of the curse,” Mindy says behind her, unironic and the furthest thing from mediocre. “It’s the power you give the curse.”

And just like that, the fabric of the world tears anew.

+

“You’re here,” the angel says. “What are you doing here?” Her name tag says Beadie, and some deep knowledge in Eleanor’s human bones knows that means they’ve found a way into The Good Place, built on new foundations. She also knows the angel isn’t challenging them – she’s asking for the future.

They could build a future based on Chidi’s philosophy lessons, or Michael’s mistakes, or for people like her, or people like Tahani, or even for human disasters from Florida. They could build a future based on justice or ethics or love.

“We’re here,” she says, “to do better. Whatever the hell that means."

+

Heaven is fundamentally indescribable; even a heaven she had helped build. They hadn’t promoted them for it, but they had listened. They hadn’t changed heaven with war, or the threat of war, but the simple method that had changed all of humanity a thousand times over.

(They’d changed it with hope, and with trying; nothing more.)

“Happy?” Tahani asks, coming in with fresh drinks and the remote tucked under her chin. She curls up next to Eleanor and hands her a sticky sweet cocktail that makes Eleanor’s head buzz, even here in heaven (but, she’s been delighted to discover, no hangovers!). The couch is big enough for the two of them curled together and nobody else, and Tahani pulls Eleanor’s legs across her lap, drawing Eleanor closer, the easy familiarity of the moment pervading everything.

“Just wondering how many of these it takes to have you watch _The Real Housewives of Atlanta_ with me,” she says cheerfully, and as Tahani groans in faux despair, Eleanor turns on _Deirdre and Margaret_ instead and settles in for the long haul of eternity with a smile, despite herself.

(It is, she imagines, something just like paradise.)

_Finis_

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The credential badges that show what you need them to show is a Doctor Who reference.  
2\. "It's not the power of the curse, it's the power you give the curse." (Penelope)  
3\. I have real trouble with soulmates in fiction (in text or by the text) so S3 kind of took me a while to recover from but this is my solution.
> 
> [Complete with aesthetic post over on Tumblr!](https://ladytharen.tumblr.com/post/188335544944/brought-to-you-by-if-the-good-place-isnt-going)


End file.
